Europe is “regulating itself to death” on AI, Bosch CEO says

Stefan Hartung, CEO of German tech company Bosch, is warning the European Union (EU) that policymakers are hindering progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) compared to other parts of the world.

“Europe is unnecessarily delaying its AI future with excessive regulation,” Hartung said at a tech conference in Stuttgart.

According to the CEO, lawmakers should not overregulate AI development but instead limit themselves to a framework covering the most important points.

“Otherwise, we will regulate ourselves to death because we are trying to regulate against technological progress,” he said.

Press agency Reuters says that Bosch, which holds the most AI patents in Europe, plans to invest an additional €2.5 billion in AI development by the end of 2027. The company is also working on AI solutions for autonomous driving and more efficient industry systems.

The combination of bureaucracy and strict, vague requirements is making Europe less attractive for AI companies to invest, Hartung added.

In August 2024, the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive law on artificial intelligence, went into effect in Europe. The objective is to restrict the use of AI technology in Europe to safeguard fundamental civil rights such as privacy and to prevent potential dangers like discrimination and exclusion.

To achieve this, artificial intelligence is divided into three risk levels:

• Low-risk AI applications, like chatbots and deepfakes
• High-risk AI applications, like smart cameras with facial recognition software
• Banned AI applications, like systems capable of assessing and scoring people’s mood and behavior, and scraping software.

At the same time, Europe is trying to accelerate AI development on the continent.

In April 2025, Brussels launched its AI Continent Action Plan to boost Europe’s AI innovation capabilities. The European Commission intends to strengthen Europe’s supercomputing infrastructure by building 13 AI factories to support AI startups, industry, and researchers in developing AI models and applications.

In addition, the EU wants to help set up multiple AI “gigafactories” equipped with almost 100,000 state-of-the-art AI chips.

“They will integrate massive computing power and data centers to train and develop complex AI models at an unprecedented scale. The AI gigafactories will lead the next wave of frontier AI models and maintain the EU's strategic autonomy in critical industrial sectors and science, requiring public and private investments,” the European Commission said at the time.